The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, the approaches described in this section may not be prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Computer networks can be used to transport electronic messages of various kinds and using various techniques. Some messages carry structured electronic documents. An example of a structured electronic document is an extensible markup language (XML) document. XML documents can be carried in network messages using stream data transmission.
At a receiving node, there is a need to determine characteristics of an arriving streamed XML message so that other data processing can be performed on the message based on the characteristics. Characteristics of the messages can be identified using an expression language known as Xpath. In systems that use large numbers of Xpath expressions and that process large volumes of XML messages, presently known methods for determining which Xpath expressions the documents satisfy are typically slow and inefficient.